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May 16th, 2011 13:00

Storage vMotion and Multipathing

I have a customer who has an ESX 3.5 host connected to HDS storage on dual redundant fabrics, albeit using Brocade default zones.  They wish to migrate storage from the HDS array to an ESXi 4.1 host on VMAX; the VMAX is on another (dual fabric)  SAN with single initiator zoning.  Merging the two SANs is not an option.  Below is the proposed configuration for migration:

Host1 : ESX 3.5 host; source host; NMP; SAN1

Host2: ESXi 4.1 host (new), target host; PowerPath/VE; SAN2

LUN1: LUN on source array

LUN2: LUN on target array

In order for each host to see all storage for vMotion migration, the following is proposed:

Host1:

HBA1: Remain in Default Zone (LUN1) on SAN1 with NMP

HBA2: Rezone to target storage (LUN2) in single-initiator zone on SAN2 with NMP

Host2:

HBA1: Zone to source storage (LUN1, mapped to new HDS Host Port) in single-initiator zone on SAN2 with PowerPath/VE

HBA2: Zone to target storage (LUN2) in single-initiator zone on SAN2 with PowerPath/VE

That is, HBA1 on Host1 will retain a connection to a switch on SAN1 until the migration completes, in order to incur no downtime.  At no time will both NMP and PowePath/VE both be installed on any host; however LUN1 will be managed by NMP on Host1 and by PowerPath/VE on Host2 for the duration of migration.  My question is, does this scenario pose any potential scanning/configuration issues?

154 Posts

May 20th, 2011 08:00

Hi Mike.  I can say from PowerPath/VE's perspective that is a supportable configuration for a transitional period.  In a cluster, one host may still have NMP while another may have PowerPath/VE.  We expect this scenario to occur as customers move from native multipathing to PowerPath multipathing.

-Brion

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